The cyclone and storm surge in Burma that swept away the lives of tens of thousands and the hopes of millions contain lessons for everybody, everywhere, including the British universities.

One lesson is that to avert disaster, you have to prepare for it. You need physical geographers to identify the terrain at risk from flooding and social geographers to identify the most vulnerable communities. You need hydraulic engineers, wind engineers, hydrologists, meteorologists and oceanographers to tell you what is going to happen, and you need alert communications engineers, analysts, and responsible communicators to get the right message to the authorities and then to the people.

But you need more than that. You need a culture of responsibility, in which local, civic and national authorities understand that warnings are to be heeded, and passed on. Where this does not exist, the rich and powerful tend to survive because they get at least some warning and usually live in the safest places, while the poor perish in their tens of thousands. The worst natural disaster of the 20th century happened in Bangladesh in 1970: an estimated 500,000 died in a tropical cyclone and storm surge. It happened again in 1991 - more than 130,000 died - but now Bangladesh maintains an enormous network of highly-motivated volunteers who warn the poorest villages, the most miserable shantytowns, and the most isolated farmers and fishermen in the path of each storm, up to 48 hours ahead. But this machinery of survival depends on mutual trust and cooperation, not just between people and rulers, but between research institutions, aid agencies, international organisations and neighbouring states.

So the second lesson of the tragedy in Burma is that sovereignty, isolation and national security are meaningless ideas under such circumstances. If Burma - under brutal and heedless military rule for the last 40 years - had been a civilised state with an open government and contact with the rest of the planet, the worst might have averted. In theory, the government of Myanmar had access to the same weather reports available to everyone else.

But to take full advantage of warnings from the World Meteorological Organisation and any number of south Asian neighbourhood-watch schemes, you need a free press, a responsible media, a civil service that serves the people as well as the government, and a government that depends on the respect of its citizens to stay in power. You also need to understand that, however expensive it might seem to prepare for a natural disaster that hasn't happened, it will always be more costly not to prepare for the one that is about to hit you.

The third lesson is that however devastating such storms are now, they could get worse. This is the logic of population growth and economic advancement. Every year, there will be more people at risk - the population of the planet grows by 10,000 an hour - and these people will have more to lose. More than half will live in cities, and many of those city-dwellers will live on the margins, in the poorest buildings, on the terrain most at hazard. So even if the ferocity of storms and floods was unchanging, the number of potential victims at hazard would increase. But the logic of global warming means that the oceans will get warmer, which means that wind and rainstorms could become more terrible. The statistics are debatable, but the reasoning is sound enough. A warmer planet means that more energy is going into the system: this energy will express itself somewhere. There is a well-established link between ocean temperature and hurricane or cyclone hazard. An increase in the number and violence of tropical cyclones seems plausible.

So there is a case for yet more research into the mechanics of meteorological violence.

Put this way, a tropical cyclone is not just a destructive force: it could and should also be the stimulus for a job creation scheme. The developing world needs more people trained in the physical and social sciences, it needs more engineers, more imaginative administrators and more far-seeing medical investment. Every natural disaster is a reminder of how little we know about our own planet, and how much more there is to learn about the forces that distribute water, wind and heat around the habitable zones.

Every natural disaster is a reminder that knowledge is power. If we know what could happen, then we have no excuse for not doing something about it.

So, thanks to a great deal of effort from the disaster research community and the UN's own International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction, based in Geneva, authorities in some of the world's most crowded cities have begun to think seriously about the hazards around them. Windstorms and torrential rain and rising sea levels may be on the increase, but some monsters of natural phenomena - powerful earthquakes, destructive volcanoes, catastrophic landslips - are much harder to predict and almost impossible to avert.

So the case for the most basic study of the planet - it is called geophysics - is more urgent than ever. Wouldn't you just know that the appetite among British students for geophysics is so limited, according to a 2006 Geological Society study, that on present rates, by 2030 there will be no British undergraduates in the field at all? Without undergraduates, there can be no graduates, post-graduates and doctorates. In effect, we won't be able to help the people most at risk from natural hazards because we simply won't have the expertise.

Every natural disaster is a reminder that most of the time, most of us are simply lucky to be alive. But every natural disaster is also a reminder that one day, our luck too might run out. And if our universities continue to turn out ever smaller numbers of people with the right training in mathematics, physics, modelling, chemistry and the earth sciences, then one day our luck will run out and we won't even know what hit us, because we won't have trained the people who might have seen it coming.